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An anonymous reader writes "Thorium, an abundant and radioactive rare earth mineral, could be used in conjunction with a laser and mini turbines to easily produce enough electricity to power a vehicle. When thorium is heated, it generates further heat surges, allowing it to be coupled with mini turbines to produce steam that can then be used to generate electricity. Combining a laser, radioactive material, and mini-turbines might sound like a complicated alternative solution to filling your gas tank, but there's one feature that sells it as a great alternative solution: 1 gram of thorium produces the equivalent energy of 7,500 gallons of gasoline."

Also sounds like 1g of Thorium probably only translates to 7500 gal of gasoline under optimal conditions, which I take to mean unrealistic efficiencies and economies of scale beyond what's achievable for a turbine that would fit in a small car. Just one of the silly things about steam turbines, they're only really efficient enough to be practical when they're really really big (like, 777 or better yet factory-sized).

The term "rare earth" is a bit of a misnomer. The materials themselves are not that rare. The issue is that they are not commonly found in a rich deposit. Rather, they are dispersed throughout an area, requiring expensive mining and refining techniques.

Assuming 50% real world efficiency, and that your car averages 20mpg, 1 gram of thorium would still get you through your first 75,000 miles. I'm ok with that! They can design a helium fuel tank to not rupture in an explosive manner at highway speeds in a car, surely they can put 1g of thorium in a container that won't disperse the material in an aerosol form on impact. I'm not sure what the cost of Thorium is, but I'm willing to bet 1g of refined Thorium is under $200. I spend that much on gas in a month.

I think the challenge here is not to design a container that won't explode, but to design a container to keep environmentalists' brains from exploding when they hear the words 'car' and 'radioactiver' used together.

Well, there's also the bit that if it starts going into cars, demand will go up, and so it will be more expensive.

That said, it'll be part of the price of the new car, so you won't notice as much. If you're dropping $30,000 on a car, you won't notice an extra 3 or 4 grand on the loan for the first 10 years of fuel all that much.

If this ever came to fruition, it would wreck hell on the roads until we re-organized the tax system to collect infrastructure taxes off of something other than gasoline.

Rare earth elements arent actually rare, its just a confusing name. Thorium is actually pretty plentiful, 3 or 4 times more common than uranium and its very easy to extract. We get it was a by product when we purify the rare earths we need anyways. Thorium would have been used for the original nuclear reactors, its vastly safer and you cant use it to manufacture weapons. And therein lies the problem of course, they wanted to be able to make nukes from reactors back when we built them.

I believe you are right about them really making the numbers sound much better than they should be. That sounds like the kind of efficiency youd get from using thorium in a full-scale nuclear plant.

I just read the article - this is a scam. A hoax. They say one gram = 7500 gallons of gasoline but at the end claim no nuclear reactions are taking place. They say you have to "superheat" the thorium for that to happen.

Without nuclear reactions, there is no way to have one gram of thorium release the same energy as 7500 gallons of gasoline. It's simply impossible.

And there is no way to have a laser cause a nuclear reaction unless you are using it to implode targets.

Thorium is being looked at as reactor fuel but it's not the kind of reactor that would fit under an automobile hood.

It is pretty obvious that it is a hoax. If they could pull this off at the car level then they could certainly pull it off at larger scales, such as power generating plants. And much safer too, since power generating plants crash into each other much less often than cars do. Since the technology isn't being used to replace uranium based nuclear reactors, and more uranium based reactors are being planned in spite of the many problems (waste products, and the slightly annoying problem of destroying large area

It's symptomatic of the way people expect a magic solution. I'm quite depressed I've scrolled this far down through all the comments before someone said "bullshit".

I love new technology, and am not necessarily skeptical. However, when someone claims magic fuel, when easily transportable fuel is _the_ problem with fuel that has not been solved in the history of humanity (we're not orders of magnitude away from carrying food for your horse)... I am a little skeptical.

Have to agree here. It's got to be a scam. I didn't make it past the fourth paragraph of the article before we delved into the world of pseudoscience. Heating thorium makes it "more" dense ad that's why it give off more heat? There must be a Nobel prize in there somewhere. A material that compresses when you heat it, rather than expanding. While it might, or might not, be true at a certain temperature and pressure, like the triple point or some other boundary condition, it certainly wouldn't be true in a ge

There's legitimate research into using a petawatt laser to knock neutrons out of things like gold, which then cause the thorium to fission. None of those things are radioactive decay though. Incidentally, a petawatt laser is rather larger than something you could put in a car.

a thorium reactor for cars (with risk of collision) would forcibly be of the pressurized water, where pure, de-ionized water is heated by the radiactive element, then this water heats regular tap water to generate steam.

the pure water in the primary circuit only gets dumped when the reactor is decomissioned at the end of it's usefull life, in a proper recycling facility that's able to filter any radioactive ions and seal them before dumping the water.

If someone can do this with a motorcycle, think about a few changes to make the engine run at 3600 rpm in the US or 3000 RPM overseas, or variable RPM with an inverter.

Having the ability to have cheap power, even if it about 5 to 20 kilowatts would change life greatly for villages. This would provide water filteration ability, power for a water pump for running water, lights, HVAC for a building for those too young/old/infirm to take the heat. Slightly larger models can help with desalination (even if it is the primitive process of distilling the water 3-4 times), and then pumping it inland.

Another use for this would be coupling the motor with an inverter and a capacitor bank and having clean power for remote data centers, be it a shed that has a heater to keep the servers running in the middle of Alaska to transmit weather and seismic info, to stations which watch forest 24/7 in case of forest fire, to seismic info near volcanos.

Cars are cool, but the biggest application for this technology wouldn't be transportation (although it would help it), but electricity generation.

I love the idea of massively decentralized power generation. It could free up gigatons of metals that we're currently using in high-tension lines, towers, tranformers, etc, etc. Not to mention, without transmission lines, your power doesn't have to fail anytime you have a massive snowstorm.

First source that came up gave 48.5mpg mileage for the Honda NT700 so at 7,500 gallons of gas, and assuming no significant overhead for using thorium, you're looking at 360,000 miles before you need a refill. Even at 10% efficiency, one gram would last you more than the average life expectancy of a motorcycle (at least according to a few sites out there).

Because batteries suck. The author assumes they will still suck in the time it would take to get this pipe dream running.

I think he's a twit. Even with the expected short term market failure of electric cars the battery market is big enough to support lots of r&d. Laptops have brought us to where we are with battery technology. Laptops, tablets, phones, model airplanes etc etc eventually cars will continue to push battery technology. Moores law has a new corrillary.

There is a "Moore's Law" sort of thing happening with battery technology, but it isn't an 18 month-3 year cycle. It is more like battery capacity doubles every 10-15 years or so. It is still remarkable, but not nearly as steep as Moore's law has been for consumer electronics.

Keep in mind that some of the very first automobiles of any kind (like back when Henry Ford was still on the assembly line) were electric vehicles. The basic technology for electric vehicles is nearly a century old. There have been

Unfortunately, this technology probably won't get to far after people read the word 'radioactive', even though I'd hazard to guess that 8g of Thorium probably has less environmental and health impact than 7,500 gallons of gasoline. Otherwise it sounds awesome. Is there another word for 'radioactive' we can use to get rid of the negative connotation?

Unfortunately, this technology probably won't get to far after people read the word 'radioactive', even though I'd hazard to guess that 8g of Thorium probably has less environmental and health impact than 7,500 gallons of gasoline. Otherwise it sounds awesome. Is there another word for 'radioactive' we can use to get rid of the negative connotation?

Hom many gallons of gasoline does it take to mine 8g of Thorium? Oil comes out of the ground pretty easily. Is it similer to mining coal? Or are we talking displacing and sifting through a ton of dirt and rock?

Cars crash. It's a fact of life. I would much rather use that thorium in a reactor somewhere, then transfer the power from the reactor to the car. You know, on account of the fact that stationary reactors are much less likely to crash and spew parts everywhere.

Cars crash. It's a fact of life. I would much rather use that thorium in a reactor somewhere, then transfer the power from the reactor to the car. You know, on account of the fact that stationary reactors are much less likely to crash and spew parts everywhere.

Well they can design black boxes to withstand aircraft impacts at 10x the speed a normal passenger car travels on any restricted speed highway on the planet. It wouldn't be that hard. The hard parts are 1) Is this real or just a scam? (I'd bank on scam) and 2) If it is real try to get this past the petrol giants.

Despite their name, rare earth elements (with the exception of the radioactive promethium) are relatively plentiful in the Earth's crust, with cerium being the 25th most abundant element at 68 parts per million (similar to copper). However, because of their geochemical properties, rare earth elements are typically dispersed and not often found in concentrated and economically exploitable forms known as rare earth minerals.[3] It was the very scarcity of these minerals (previously called "earths") that led to the term "rare earth". The first such mineral discovered was gadolinite, a compound of cerium, yttrium, iron, silicon and other elements. This mineral was extracted from a mine in the village of Ytterby in Sweden; many of the rare earth elements bear names derived from this location.

"rare earth" doesn't mean rare. "Rare earth's" are a class of elements that are fairly common in the Earth's crust but not often concentrated enough for profitable mining. The concentrated deposits that do exist tend to have many kinds of rare earth's which makes the extraction that much more difficult because they are chemically similar.

What's more, you could charge a battery powered electric vehicle at your house, and save the need for you to lug around a small nuclear reactor in your car. The article talks about the difficulties of miniaturizing it for use in cars. Simple solution: don't. We already have batteries that fit nicely into a car and have a range nearing 300 miles, in 10 years that range will probably be 10 times what it is today. Plus, if it meant efficient energy, I wouldn't really mind something the size of a box truck in my backyard, or my basement. Hell, you could probably bury most of the reactor underground.

What's more, you could lug around a small nuclear reactor, and save the need to use giant batteries filled with caustic chemicals manufactured by toxic processes. They're talking about something small and light enough you personally could pick it up and put it in your trunk.

According to the article, the thorium takes 30 seconds of heating before it can be used. Where does the power to run the 250 MW laser come from during this time? Or even after?

This is just some guy trying to drum up support for his startup. A combination of mining issues, radioactivity (what happens in a car crash -- call out the hazmat team!) and unproven efficiency beg this to fail.

This concern would be easily addressed if instead we tried putting these things in our back yards, and not in cars. Then, it would just be running all the time, possibly with enough power in batteries or capacitors to cover the power needs for a few start-ups. We already have small batteries that fit into cars, which could be charged at home. I can't fathom why we'd insist on carrying around a small nuclear reactor with us in our car.

There's something seriously lacking in the explanation. "When thorium is heated, it generates further heat surges." Where do these come from?

Nuclear fission? Perhaps possible, but why does it need to be heated for it?Alpha and beta decay? Again, possible and even happens, but in that case 1 gram isn't going to be nearly enough.Or perhaps thorium is being used as a store of energy, but there are better materials for it and a gram is again tiny.

As is mine. Looking at both articles, and googling a bit, I keep running across a statement to the effect that when the Thorium is heated, its molecules become so dense that it produces heat surges. Then they go on to talk about the amount of energy that could be extracted from Thorium in a fission reaction.

These articles also mention that it is believed that the internal heat of the Earth is due largely in part to the presence of uranium and

Stevens agrees, emphasizing his system is “subcritical.” This means no nuclear reaction occurs within the thorium. It remains in the same state...

...in which case it's not clear where the energy is coming from. It's apparently not coming from fissioning or from breeding some fissile element. It can't be coming from decay heat which would be extremely trivial in this case.

Every home with an atomic pile! Atomic cars! It's the 50's atomic utopia!

So, what's the thorium turn into once it's been used? That's one big question. How much radioactivity does it generate and what kinds when it is being used? And will we ever get over the fright of people having 'nuclear cars'? Will it be much worse for someone to be in possession of 8 grams of thorium than a truckload of fertilizer and some diesel fuel?

Doesn't solve the problem of steam inefficiency. There were plenty of steam cars and even the more efficient ones that reclaimed some of the steam were never particularly great on water consumption. You'd likely need to stop more often for water than you currently do for gas, and water is of course quite bulky and heavy just like gas. It's a cool idea either way, but I'd prefer a mechanical drive setup like traditional steam cars and steam engines.

Are they being followed in this article? What I do not understand is how slight radioactivity can produce more heat than is required to start the process, and how 1 gram is 7,500 gallons of gas. What in the thorium model is being consumed, and how is it being consumed without radioactive decay? Makes no sense...

Radioactive decay can't be stimulated by lasers.The original article links eventually to what is basically a crackpot attempting to steal investors money.The whole basis of the article is a complete fabrication, or at best delusion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactivity [wikipedia.org] "Radioactive decay is a stochastic (i.e., random) process at the level of single atoms, in that, according to quantum theory, it is impossible to predict when a given atom will decay."

Disprove this - by making it nonrandom - and you as a starting point have just got a nice shiny Nobel prize.

This is not, strictly speaking, true. If you had a gamma ray laser you might be able to affect how a nucleus decayed. The real issue is that none of the lasers we have have a high enough frequency to affect an atomic nucleus.

And pouring on more light won't help. It needs to be quantized so each little packet that could potentially absorbed has an energy level that allows it to interact with the thing doing the absorbing.

So, yesterday I read that MIT cured the common cold, Penn cured Leukemia, a cancer, and today a private researcher claims to have solved both the fuel and emissions problems that are currently only getting worse. Okay, yeah, all of these are preliminary and experimental, but holy shit... Got Hope? Obama fucking delivered!

Far too many nut jobs in America (on both sides of the equation) will carp about this as being dangerous on the highways. However, there would be multiple places why this should be developed quickly:
1) Tractors, construction equipment, etc. all make heavy use of fuel. By putting this in these, it would drop energy usage across the nation by 5% or more (yup, this equipment makes HEAVY use of fuel). In addition, it has the advantage that there is LITTLE chance of accidents compared to highway miles.
2) Trains. This could be used on trains easily. Relatively few accidents compared to cars. In addition, there could be one car up front for the engineer and major motor, with this on another car 1-2 back. With that approach, less chance of damage (again keeping the nut jobs happy).
2) Space. We need the ability to send nuke power to the moon and mars. Nut jobs get upset about Pb going up. Thorium is SAFE by itself AND even less is needed. It is ideal to send up something like this to the moon, remote missions, etc. Heck, combine this with the new Stirling power generator and we can send new voyagers out that have a VASIMR engine that will work for the next 40 years.

Thorium, by itself, does not fission. You need a neutron source to breed Uranium from Thorium which you can then fission. Just shooting a lazer at Thorium isn't going to do anything. Thorium is radioactive but you will need much more than a few grams to power you car that way.

Laser-induced fission [aip.org] is quite feasible, and requires far less energy input than laser-induced fusion. Laser fission of thorium [nucleonica.net] has been done on a small scale as a lab experiment. Thorium reactors have been built, with modest success.

A pure thorium reactor won't achieve criticality, because thorium has no isotopes that fission on their own. The fuel has to have uranium or plutonium mixed in to start the nuclear reaction. The laser concept seems to be to use a laser to get things going.

There's been some interest in accelerator-pumped thorium fission. [world-nuclear.org] It's been tried in Japan [kyoto-u.ac.jp], but that group hasn't reached breakeven.
It's a plausible concept, but so far nobody has been able to figure out a way to make it work.

Incidentally, this is not a "clean" process. It generates radioactive by-products where the accelerator beam hits the thorium, in addition to the usual nuclear reactor fission products. A car-sized version is a fantasy.

First of all the claim that no nuclear reactions are going on must be false for this to work at all, otherwise this is just another perpetual motion machine.

Second, what do they mean by "heat pulses"? The only way I can see this working is if the laser manages to knock some particles loose, generate a few antiparticles, or momentarily compresses a small area of the thorium causing a non-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. If you could cause a small reaction you could certainly get some heat out of it but it would definitely be a nuclear reaction converting mass into energy.

This smells like a scam and I will assume it to be one until proof is offered.

The whole article is GARBAGE, pure and simple. And people discuss how the price of Thorium affects the viability of this scheme.

"When thorium is heated it becomes extremely hot and causes heat surges allowing it to be coupled with mini turbines producing steam that can then be used to generate electricity. It also helps that it has a very large liquid range between melting and boiling point."

Newsflash: when iron is heated it becomes extremely hot! Let's power our cars by bars of steel heated by lasers!

You are not going to get additional energy out of thorium unless you start a nuclear chain reaction (discounting its minuscule decay heat). And to start it you need to make it critical. Critical mass of a Thorium sphere is about 20kg. And while you might lower it a bit by compressing it, I somehow doubt that you're going to have Jupiter-core-level pressure to make 8g of Th dense enough to support the chain reaction.

And even if you do, you'll get a non-trivial amount of energy in form of such nice things as gamma rays and neutrons. And remember, it takes about 1000 Joules of gamma ray energy to kill you. That's about 0.05 seconds of output of 20kW engine.

It is a bad thing that in 2011 we're still trying to use non-renewable resources to power transportation for everyone. Even with the US having 400000 tons of thorium, I figure that's enough to power 150 billion cars. Sound like a lot, not really. In 100 years we'll be back to the same spot we are now and be guilty of pushing the problem off to our descendants.

Don't tell them that their smoke detectors may contain Americium, a radioactive element. But I guess that's ok since it's named after America and thus Patriotic. An element named after a foreign God isn't going to get cut the same kind of slack.

However you look at it, it will produce the electrical power enough to run a car many times over. A simple short would be enough to create quite a large explosion, given the right condition.

Ever short-circuited a lead-acid battery of large power? You can easily maim lots of people, if that's your objective. My dad did it once in a warehouse (pre-health-and-fecking-safety) by putting a spanner on a fork-truck battery. You can literally blow the fork truck to pieces and they were scraping acid off the wal

You'd almost certainly need at least some battery power between the generator and the drive-train. The battery would handle temporary spikes in power (acceleration), etc. It would also allow you to run the laser for the 30 seconds required to get the reaction going.

No this is great! It'll be putting another tax on stupidity, the anti-nuclear crowd will have to pay for gas in their cars while we drive around at a tiny fraction of the cost! I don't like the carbon capping schemes I've seen so far but if we come up with a good one, that will hurt them even more! I'm all for it!

Power and Power variation. To get enough power out of steam, you have to have high compressions, which steam is lousy at. Driving a turbine to generate electricity can be done at lower compressions, and also at more constant compressions.

Likely for the same reason that diesel-electric locomotives go to all the trouble of generating electricity rather than just powering the wheels from the diesel engine.

An steam engine of the piston and cylinder type - your traditional steam engine - isn't terribly efficient and requires high steam pressures. It is also difficult to recycle the water. Such engines do not have high cyclic rates but can produce quite a lot of horsepower, making it very unsuitable for something like a lightweight car. The engine would be really awful at high speeds and require a huge and very complicated transmission to operate at both low and high speeds.

Conversely, a steam turbine could operate with lower pressures but at vastly higher speeds with much less horsepower. You can't make it run very slowly at all, and like a lot of turbines the different in rotational speed between idle and max power is rather small. This would require a very complicated transmission, probably with some sort of variable-ratio component to get any speed control at all.

The end result is that it isn't just more efficient to spin the turbine at a fixed speed and use an electrical system to control the power to the wheels, it is likely the only way to do it at all that is even remotely practical. It is the fundamental reason why we don't have turbine powered cars and trucks today.

Storing steam for future use requires a continuous heat source, or else when you go to harness your leftover steam, you find a puddle. Electricity is easier to route and control, and definitely easier to store. Also, whereas you'd need a big hollow pipe to transfer steam to the drivetrain, electric motors make do with wires. It's lighter, easier to control and more efficient to store.

Are you familiar with steam-powered cars in the early 1900's? Whereas today you'd turn a key and engage the starter an

However you are forcing the thorium into decay and using the excess energy. You're basically burning the thorium.

The thorium, like most radioactive materials just helps itself along once it gets to a certain temperature through other means.

I would figure that efficiency margins are simply wildly over estimated. There may be 250kw of energy in that thorium, but you're going to lose a fair bit of it to the simple fact of keeping the reaction going.